Box turns to Windows Phone

Mark Raby, 24th July 2012

Second-fiddle cloud platform Box has launched a new app for Windows Phone.

The company believes that setting up a new presence on Microsoft's mobile operating system will help it better compete with more publicized cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

It's hard to imagine this move having a huge impact, though. Windows Phone only has around a 4% market share in the smartphone industry.

"Windows phone hasn't shown the traction yet, but we get a lot of customer questions. Windows Phone is definitely No. 3 in terms of questions. And that may indicate potential for the future. We're investing in Windows 8 too," said Box VP of platform engineering Matthew Self.

But wait, there's more. Box has also joined into a partnership with Qualcomm to offer preloads on certain mobile devices running on the Snapdragon processor.

This means that it will be a seamless and user-friendly way for smartphone owners to save files and media to the cloud, making it accessible to any device that has an Internet connection.

Box's niche in the increasingly muddled cloud space is in the enterprise segment. It knows that the average user is going to turn to Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, or Google Drive, but when it comes to large-scale business needs, it offers some differentiating features.

Box has also already confirmed that it will have a strong presence on Windows 8, which is due out later this year.